


there's a killer in my bed (and all I have to do is watch you breathing)

by OfShoesAndShips



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell & Related Fandoms, Ladies of Grace Adieu - Susanna Clarke
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 10:05:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10511550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfShoesAndShips/pseuds/OfShoesAndShips
Summary: After one of the prospective endings of the Lost Hope RP, things are simpler than they ought to be.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is rough but I remembered gulltown's excellent gifset of these two and, since I needed to cheer myself up tonight, I thought I would finish and post this. It takes place after one of the various endings for this RP, and I can't remember if we did in fact play this one out or not - I don't think so but who knows. 
> 
> Title is an amalgam of Love Ain't Enough by The Barr Brothers and There Will Be No Divorce by The Mountain Goats.

The room, when he reaches it, is dark; not even moonlight eases its way through the narrow window. Through the crack in the door he can see the far edge of her bed, her plain and tangled bedsheets, her foot hanging a bare inch from the floor. He can hear her breathing, worn and slightly harsh even in sleep, and he remembers the night so long ago when he had laid his hand on the scar on her neck and tried to heal it. He had grown used to the sound of her beside him, after a while, sleeping a little way from him while he read; it seems strange to him now, but stranger still that it does. Quickly he adds up the years, or as close as he can reckon, and realises with a cold shock that they have been apart now for longer than they were ever elsewise. He reaches out, pushes the door open, and steps inside. He refuses to let himself watch her sleep, so he misses the moment when she stirs; he does not miss the cool greyness of a muzzle when it swings into his eye line. 

“Joan,” he says, looking past the gun to her small, bandaged hand, to her mussed hair, to the fallen shoulder of her shift, to her eyes as they roll and she lets herself fall back into the pillow.

“I didn’t hear the wards,” she says, voice low and dark with sleep.

“They didn’t break.” He sits down, on the edge of the bed, and reaches out to take the gun from her slackened hand. She tightens her grip.

“What are you doing here?”

“What am I usually doing here?”

“I can’t be arsed with you, Tom, give me a straight fucking answer-”

“Be quiet for once in your life and let me-”

“Don’t you dare tell me to be quiet,” she half shouts, voice strained and oddly high, and this, this is more familiar than he ever wanted and he starts to stand up. She makes a disgusted noise and throws the sheets back, adjusting her shift and getting a robe from the chair in the corner that is, as ever, piled high with mending.

“Take the damn bed, since you’re so bothered. I won’t sleep again anyroad.”

She pulls the robe around her shoulders and as she walks away down the hall he realises it’s an old one of his, taken up and mended. It should make him feel something, but it doesn’t. He kicks his shoes off and curls up in her still-warm sheets, clutching them and shaking and pretending he isn’t comforted by the way the smell of her lingers.

 

Joan stumbles down her stairs, hot with anger, flushed and unsteady and foggy still with sleep. Her knees bow on the final step and she half falls, half lowers herself to sit on the stair. He is upstairs, in her bed, and she can’t seem to breathe through that – it’s not like it was the week before when he came to her, scared and twisted up inside and it’s not like the time before, when he was half-dead, or the time before that when he needed her for – she can’t remember, now.

But the point is that everything was supposed to be over, and he still came back. And whatever the hell he’s come back for – sleep, absolution, the heart in the box she’s hidden away under the hearth like fishermen in stories – well, she’s not sure she can give him it any more.

She pulls the robe tighter around her, tight enough to feel it pull across her shoulders. It’s not cold but she feels the chill anyway, flexes her bare feet on the step. She lifts one hand to her neck, traces her finger over the coolness of the chain.

The Gentleman tied them together, he did. Ripped them both to pieces so they only fit each other, not back into themselves. Tom loved him, somehow. She never did, never, but she owed him in some tangled up, fay kind of fashion. She owed him clear enough for her not exactly dying but what happened after, that’s the tangled part.

Her hand still burns from the iron shot she’d loaded the gun with. She’s been in Faerie too long.

She blinks, swallows. Doesn’t dab moisture from her eyes but lets it run, just for a second, before letting out a low, frustrated sound, half sob half snarl.

She clutches the bannister, tips sideways until she’s leant against it, the strut pressed against her temple.

“God, Tom,” she whispers, expecting to say more but unable to find it. She shivers, drags in a long breath. Her hand finds its way back to the chain and she remembers how, every time she had seen him – even though the worst of it – he always wore the ring.

She stands up, shaky still, and stumbles back up the stairs. They creak under her, and again she wonders how she hadn’t woken, how she’d slept until he was at the foot of the bed. Well – no, she knows. It’s the same reason the wards would not break with his passing.

She opens her own door and slips inside, closing it behind her. He looks asleep, though she can’t always tell; he’s curled up on top of the sheets, his long, dark hair splayed out over the pillow, and he’s taken his jacket and waistcoat off, his shirt pooling slightly on the bed and showing up his thinness. She clenches her jaw, reaches out to touch him and lets her arm fall. If she isn’t mistaken he breathes out at that very moment, and she smiles, walking around the bed to her own side.

“You may as well get under the bloody sheets,” she says, quietly, sitting down.

She can feel him, behind her, rolling slightly towards her with the dipping of the mattress.

“Joan?”

She pushes back the sheets with her feet and then tugs them up over her, settling back into the shape of herself in the mattress. “If you came for owt else than sleep you’ll have to wait till morning.”

He sighs, and gets up. For a moment she entertains the idea that she’s misjudged, but after a second she’s reassured that that’s nonsense, because all he does is lift the sheets and get in behind her. After a quiet, still second, she turns over to face him.

“Tom,” she whispers.

“Mm?” He lifts his hand and hesitantly pushes her falling hair behind her ear.

She catches her breath and bows her head, until she’s almost able to rest her forehead against his collarbone. “I’m not going to be sorry for what I’ve done.”

“Have I asked you to be?”

“You loved him.”

“I’ve done a lot of things.”

“But you’re here.”

He starts to speak, then stops, his hand drifting through her hair and curving, very gently, around the back of her head. “Yes,” he says, after a long pause, “I am.”


End file.
